In the summer before the United States changed the rules for hearing aids, an awkward little number sat on a spreadsheet: 2 percent. That was Lexie Hearing's share of voice. The category leader owned 94 percent. It is hard to imagine a clearer description of invisibility. Lexie had a product and a coming regulatory moment, but when reporters thought about hearing aids, they did not yet think about Lexie.
SGA Communications saw a clock. The Chicago public relations boutique began work 13 months before over-the-counter hearing aids were due to arrive. It mapped the journalists who covered regulation, seniors, consumer health and medicine. It offered usable quotes from Lexie executives while the rule was still developing. Then it kept finding fresh reasons for those reporters to return: the federal announcement, an exclusive arrangement involving Bose technology, a Walgreens product launch and the day over-the-counter sales actually began.
This was not a stunt. It was a sequence. The morning Lexie announced its Walgreens launch, a satellite media tour generated 24 interviews and 2,822 placements. By the end of launch week, the brand had appeared in roughly 3,000 stories. Its overall share of voice reached 49 percent, and October sales rose 105 percent over their average. Industry judges noticed, too: the work won the 2023 North American SABRE Award for medical technology, placed second for Best in Show, finished sixth globally and took PR Daily's healthcare campaign prize.
The founding editThe ampersand had to go
Stephanie Gray started Stephanie Gray & Associates in February 2020 as an individual practitioner helping small companies get quality media coverage. Two years later, the name no longer described the work. Gray had assembled a network of communications specialists serving more substantial clients in legal, financial and professional services. So the firm made an exceptionally restrained rebrand: Stephanie Gray & Associates became SGA.
The disappearing punctuation was the business model in miniature. SGA would sit between a lone consultant and a traditional agency pyramid. Clients could get senior practitioners and assemble expertise around an assignment, without paying for layers that never entered the meeting. The company does not publish a rate card, so the interesting cost is structural: SGA explicitly set out to remove unnecessary overhead while preserving experienced counsel.
Every company deserves good communications counsel.SGA Communications
Gray brought two decades of communications work across finance, professional services, technology, healthcare, manufacturing and consumer goods. Brooke Rodriguez added national media-relations experience, including work for financial-services and Fortune 100 companies. Dimitrios Kalantzis brought the habits of a newspaper editor. The blend explains the firm's house style: translate the hard thing, locate the audience that needs it, and give that audience something precise enough to repeat.
The market problemComplexity is not a message
SGA concentrates on businesses that cannot simply announce a shiny thing and wait for applause. A bank has regulators and investors. A healthcare company has patients, clinicians and policy. A law firm sells judgment that is difficult to photograph. An enterprise technology company may be fluent in product architecture and baffling to everyone who approves a budget. In each case, the communications problem is translation under constraint.
That is why the service list stretches beyond press coverage. Media relations sits beside internal communications, editorial work, thought leadership, reputation management and communications for corporate transactions. A merger, for instance, is simultaneously a story for employees, customers, reporters and investors. Treating those as unrelated assignments is how organizations end up saying four slightly different things on the same morning.
The ideal buyer is a B2B organization with an expert inside and a clarity problem outside. Publicly named customers include Lexie Hearing, the Chicago nonprofit The Ark and commercial collection agency The Kaplan Group. A testimonial from Fisher Phillips points to legal services. The sectors vary, but the buying condition is consistent: the subject is sophisticated, the audience is fragmented and loose language has consequences.
The copyable methodBorrow the calendar, not the trophy
The Lexie campaign is useful because its mechanics are visible. What failed first was simple awareness: 2 percent share of voice meant the company was nearly absent from the category conversation. What changed the equation was a known regulatory deadline. SGA worked backward from it, making Lexie helpful to journalists before the company urgently needed attention.
Name the future news event
Use a regulation, launch or transaction with a real date, consequence and affected audience.
Map beats, not just publications
A regulatory reporter and a consumer-health reporter need different evidence from the same company.
Make executives useful early
Offer clear, attributable expertise while journalists are still learning the category.
Stack distinct moments
SGA used policy, technology and retail distribution as separate chapters rather than one overloaded announcement.
Attention moved - share of voice
It is tempting to copy the visible outputs - a media tour, a wire release, an executive quote. The transferable advantage was the order. Each move made the next one more plausible. By rollout day, reporters already understood the policy, knew the company and had people to call. The news did not have to introduce the category and the brand at the same time.
A precise place in PRSenior judgment, rented by the problem
Large agencies can field deep benches across countries. In-house teams live with the business every day. Independent consultants can be wonderfully direct. SGA's wager is that some clients need pieces of all three: the responsiveness of an adviser, the range of a team and specialists who already understand why regulated language is brittle.
The method has conditions. A long runway only helps when the milestone is credible, executives are available and the product can survive informed scrutiny. A calendar cannot rescue weak evidence, and a network model is less natural for a client that requires a large, permanently dedicated account team in many markets at once. SGA's advantage is concentration, not infinite capacity.
Still, there is something pleasantly unfashionable about its strongest work. The firm did not manufacture a viral moment. It watched a rule moving through the world, decided when the public conversation would crest and spent 13 months becoming useful. At first, Lexie was the 2 percent brand. When the clock finally struck, it was already in the room.